Facebook is giving Pages administrators the ability to create their own groups, potentially providing brands and media companies new ways to boost engagement with niche groups.

The social network today announced that it’s expanding globally what it’s been testing in some markets for months. According to Facebook product manager Linda Xiong, the feature will let brands create their own pages without having to rely on admins to set up groups from their own personal accounts. That could be welcome news to social media managers who want to have more privacy and separation form work and also give organizations the chance to create “official” groups that unwanted or unofficial third parties and fan clubs can’t set up.

According to Xiong, the update is an “external reinforcement or expansion of our mission to bring the world closer together.”

A tech war has raged in China, and a winner seems ready to emerge. It’s Tencent–a controversial, $139 billion company with nearly a billion users, which functions like Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Uber all rolled into one. Now it’s gunning for global expansion.

China’s most powerful Internet company is headquartered in a bland, glassy tower in southern Shenzhen. Unlike Silicon Valley’s funky campuses, there is nothing to reveal that this might be a hub of creativity. An insurance company, perhaps? In the middle of its nondescript, corporate lobby, an information desk stands next to the only sign of personality: a pair of giant plush penguins, the Tencent mascot times two. Nearby, an iPad displays stats on the company’s messaging services. But when I pull out a notebook and start jotting down the numbers, the receptionist waves her hand. “Oh no, that’s not updated!” she says. “It’s just for show.”

I’m here for a “tour” of the company, but am only allowed entrance to a museum-like exhibit of Tencent products. The experience feels like a throwback to the tightly controlled Communist Party–sponsored trips reporters went on back in the 1980s, before the country really started opening up to the outside world. An attractive, young, fluent English speaker shuffles me from one screen to another. The three other public relations officers with me offer no analysis of the firm, saying they will get back to me on any questions I have. I ask about the management style of the somewhat mysterious CEO, Pony Ma, and there is an awkward pause. Then the guide brightly tells me: “It’s very equal here. We all call him Pony!”

Pay attention to the next commercial you hear — Odds are a man is doing the voiceover. Here’s why that’s a huge missed opportunity for anyone doing the selling.

By Carrie Faverty

Tampons. Diapers. Fruit juice.

Odds are if you’ve seen a commercial for one of these products, you’ve heard a woman’s voice on it. Still, most high-profile companies are almost always voiced by a man. Cars, electronics, financial institutions…all men. Why is this? You could argue that, historically, men were seen as authoritative figures and “the decision-makers,” so it made sense that they were the ones selling the products on TV–from one man to another. But the times they are a-changin’.

Or at least, they should be. Research from a recent Pew study shows that women are the primary or sole breadwinners in four out of 10 households–a statistic that’s gotten certain people shamefully riled up. Compared to where women were 30 to 40 years ago, it’s a staggering number, to be sure. The research begs the question: If women are the decision-makers in so many families today, why are we still not selling to them?

By Sam Mallikarjunan

December 27, 2013

Marketing automation can be an extremely powerful tool, particularly for B2C ecommerce marketers that have to create a highly personalized experience for hundreds of thousands of customers a month. However, used improperly, marketing automation can have the opposite of the intended effect and create a user experience that’s simply evil.

1) Treating B2C as faceless entities and B2B as real people

It’s impractical for most ecommerce retailers to manually go through all of their customer records and engage personally with each of them like they do in the B2B world, and this is where marketing automation gets it’s great value. In the B2B sales world, a real human being can manually review a given contact record and make human decisions about how to create a personalized and contextually relevant buying experience. In the B2C ecommerce world, that’s impossible given the sheer volume of customers we deal with.

Because of this, many ecommerce marketers have decided that if they can’t treat manually each contact as an individual person that they’re going to treat all contacts the exact same. They blast their entire email list three times a week with a coupon and call that email marketing. They show everyone the exact same content on their website. They sometimes even ignore messages and comments coming in through social media because of the sheer volume of them instead of using marketing automation to solve these problems by collecting contacts into similar buyer personas that can receive a more targeted engagement.